REVIEW: CITADEL (2012)

"An agoraphobic father teams up with a renegade priest to save his daughter from the clutches of a gang of twisted feral children who committed an act of violence against his family years earlier" - IMDB

OBS! THIS REVIEW MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS!

Supposedly inspired by a violent mugging experienced by Irish writer and director Ciarán Foy, Citadel brings you to dilapidated council flats and crumbling social highrises in a dirty British suburb, a dystopia called Edenstown. The dingy surroundings and the bleak exteriors themselves make you cringe, and after the gruesome opening where Tommy Cowley's wife is silently attacked by a gang of hooded children that stab a syringe in her highly pregnant belly - you're left with a nauseating sub-textual message.

As a result of his wife's death (after being comatose for nine months) Tommy, played by Aneurin Barnard, is left with their nine month old daughter and a severe agoraphobia. Despite his intense therapy sessions, Tommy spends most of his days hiding out indoors in his new housing, cowering reduced to a gaunt wide-eyed emotional wreck. One night there's a banging on the door.

Convinced that the hooded gang is out to kidnap his daughter Tommy finds refuge in Marie, a sympathetic nurse that helped care for his wife during her comatose. Marie patiently explains to Tommy that his fear and paranoia are all in his head. “It’s so easy to demonize these kids. What they need is our sympathy." Well, what you got Marie, is blunt force trauma to the head.

In a last desperate search for an escape Tommy turns to the local vigilante priest, played by James Cosmo, who convinces Tommy that the children aren't the result of a greater malaise - they're plainly a disease unto themselves and must therefor be extinct. And you're dying to know; are these unloved children from broken homes or creatures far more sinister than that? Together with the priest, and his blind son, Tommy sets out on a final battle to save his daughter. And his sanity.

Citadel effectively rides on its initial tension through out the movie. The story balances between the feral reality of suburban brutality with poor economics and shattered homes, and the fragile mind of a young man who just lost his wife and is battling Social Services. For the main character Tommy, it's a parable of urban anxiety and the fear of fatherhood. For the viewer, it's an uneasy blend of horror of the psychological (the agoraphobia, the paranoia, the insomnia) and the supernatural kind; are those hooded child ruffians actually freakishly skinny zombies?